eferred) 1598; but he died nearly forty years before
the author of the _Hesperides_, and nearly ten before the _Hesperides_
themselves were published, while his own poems were never collected till
after his own death. He was of a Gloucestershire branch of the famous
Devonshire family of Carew, Cary, or Cruwys, was of Merton College, Oxford,
and the Temple, travelled, followed the Court, was a disciple of Ben
Jonson, and a member of the learned and accomplished society of Clarendon's
earlier days, obtained a place in the household of Charles I., is said by
his friend Hyde to have turned to devotion after a somewhat libertine life,
and died in 1639, before the evil days of triumphant Puritanism, _felix
opportunitate mortis_. He wrote little, and the scantiness of his
production, together with the supposed pains it cost him, is ridiculed in
Suckling's doggerel "Sessions of the Poets." But this reproach (which Carew
shares with Gray, and with not a few others of the most admirable names in
literature), unjust as it is, is less unjust than the general tone of
criticism on Carew since. The _locus classicus_ of depreciation both in
regard to him and to Herrick is to be found, as might be expected, in one
of the greatest, and one of the most wilfully capricious and untrustworthy
of English critics, in Hazlitt. I am sorry to say that there can be little
hesitation in setting down the extraordinary misjudgment of the passage in
question (it occurs in the sixth Lecture on Elizabethan Literature), in
part, at least, to the fact that Herrick, Carew, and Crashaw, who are
summarily damned in it, were Royalists. If there were any doubt about the
matter, it would be settled by the encomium bestowed in the very same
passage on Marvell, who is, no doubt, as Hazlitt says, a true poet, but who
as a poet is but seldom at the highest height of the authors of "The
Litany," "The Rapture," and "The Flaming Heart." Hazlitt, then, while on
his way to tell us that Herrick's two best pieces are some trivial
anacreontics about Cupid and the Bees--things hackneyed through a dozen
literatures, and with no recommendation but a borrowed prettiness--while
about, I say, to deny Herrick the spirit of love or wine, and in the same
breath with the dismissal of Crashaw as a "hectic enthusiast," informs us
that Carew was "an elegant Court trifler," and describes his style as a
"frequent mixture of the superficial and commonplace, with far-fetched and
improbable co